Despite the Odds
"Well, I have to go back now to the Eighteenth Century where I live." That was a prominent academic historian saying his good-bye to a colleague. The past can sometimes be an interesting place to visit. However, escapism provides neither a good nor healthy place to live for extended periods. For many persons hurtful experiences and memories of the past continue to intrude on their 'right now' and make envisioning a better future difficult. Even so, ignorance of the past (whether willful or otherwise) often creates messy scenarios for present and the future.
Quoted more often that practiced, George Santayana's warning still stands: Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Seems to make sense that the better we understand the past ---our own and society's -- the greater the possibility that we can live in the now and look forward to the future.
An ancient prayer implored, "From ghoulies and ghosties, long-leggitie beasties and things that go Bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us!". Few persons today believe in literal 'ghoulies and ghosties', nontheless they have things from their past going Bump in the night, detracting from their sense of well-being. Do you remember the cartoon Calvin and Hobbes ? Calvin often heard things 'bumping' under his bed until his dad brought a flashlight. We, likewise, look for a light to bring our 'Monsters' into perspective so that we don't fall into despair that life is 'going to hell in a handbasket', despite an abundance of examples to the contrary at the moment. You want specific names for those 'monsters' ? Check most any day's newsfeed, now or even years ago. For my birthday a friend once gave me a book made up of the front page of the New York Times for that day and month going 'way back'. Some of those looked pretty current, scary and bump-in-the nightish.
Many years ago, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, a then prominent minister, preached a sermon that he called "No [one] Need Stay the Way They Are". In effect he was saying that there is a 'Yet to Come' as well as a 'Back There' and a 'Right Now' and that life can be better. Another word for that is HOPE, hardly the same thing as Pollyanna or 'Wishful thinking' ---the kind of Hope that kept Dr. Viktor Frankl alive in a Nazi concentration camp. (see his book Man's Search for Meaning).
Albert Camus writing in the aftermath of World War II contended that all was "Absurd" and without purpose or meaning. On the other hand, One dictionary sugests that having HOPE is being able to forsee a path to a better future. Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr. maintained that "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice". The late psychiatrist, Dr. Gordon Livingston in Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know pointed out that many persons find their Hope from within their religious beliefs and practices. My all-time favorite professor said that he once considered Hope to be icing on the cake of Life but more recently he believed that Hope was the very cake itself, keeping us Alive even in the presence of all that indicates otherwise. That is congruent with the words of Hymn of Promise. (Google it, if interested) Livingston also indicated that others find their Hope in different places.
There is a lot of Despair floating around these days. Is it naive to look for Hope without some idealizing the 'Good Old Days' (which were often Horrible)?
Where are you looking for/ finding Hope ?
Satchel
